I don’t mind lots of photos, LBA, post away!

This is a gimmick. Virgin wants to take over BMi, all of a sudden, BA wants to take over the world. What a pathetic move on their part, as if that’s ever going to be allowed to happen. I don’t even see Virgin taking over BMi. I ultimately see a very close codeshare cooperation, a la the one United and USAirways recently signed, in the wake of UA wanted to take them over 2 years ago. That would be the best for everyone involved, and provide an aggressive competitor to BA. What are they getting all riled up for? They’ll still dominate Heathrow.

Nice Ren (drumrole in the background)!

Possible, meaning, does the 777-300ER exist? The answer to that is ‘yes,’ albeit, it’s still in flight testing. No deliveries have been made yet. As far as Saudi Arabian taking delivery of them, that I do not know. In fact, I don’t know of any airline who is a customer of it.

Yes, I thought it was weird, too. And it wasn’t just this one time, it happened on serveral occassions the 2 weeks I was there. Every time, it was one of the Greek airlines, mainly Olympic. In their operation manual, do their landing conditions have to be absolutely perfect? I myself have only experienced a missed approach once, aboard an America West 733 from LAS-ONT. I was asleep, so I really didn’t realize what was going on, until I felt those thrusters spool up again. Am amazing feeling!

I guess they use both the A340 and the A306, Andrew. This pic was taken at LHR on May 3, 2003.

OA pulled out of Australia roughly around November, so you having seen the A340’s the past 6 months, makes sense. It’s funny you say that you saw an OA A300 abort landing twice. I was in Rhodes 4 years ago and our hotel was directly under the flight path, I’d say about 1 or 2 miles from the airport (so yes, they flew directly above us all day long, you charter boys would have loved it!). I routinely saw various Olympic and even Axon and Aegean aircraft do several missed approaches. I’ve never seen this before to this extent. One night, an OA A300B4 in an all white hybrid scheme, required 4 approaches to land. One day, and Axon 73G required 3. I guess Greek airlines are in the habit of doing missed approaches?

That’s what I thought. OA started using the A340 on their LHR flights when they cancelled their thrice weekly ATH-SYD/MEL via BKK run (no clue as to why they did this). That feed up 1 of 4 A340’s to be used on other routes. Since they were using the A300-600R on the LHR flights already, it was a logical upgrade. The other 3 OA A340’s are used on the New York, Montreal/Toronto, and Joburg runs.